Donella Meadows Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing? How do systems create cultures? How do cultures create

Donella Meadows
We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Donella Meadows
The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.

Donella Meadows
Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.

Donella Meadows
A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

Donella Meadows
Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.

Donella Meadows
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

Donella Meadows
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Donella Meadows
Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.

Donella Meadows
It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

Donella Meadows
The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.

Donella Meadows